Logistics and transport software in Australia

Is your business a Chain of Responsibility party?

If your business schedules, sends, packs, loads, unloads or receives goods moved by heavy vehicles, it’s almost certainly a party in the Chain of Responsibility under the Heavy Vehicle National Law. The NHVR is explicit that you’re a party because of a function you perform, not your job title or what the contract says.

CoR function	Typical business	What your systems should be able to show
Employer, prime contractor, operator	Carriers, owner drivers, fleet operators	Driver qualifications, vehicle maintenance, fatigue records, how jobs were allocated
Scheduler	Dispatch teams, freight brokers	That schedules allowed legal work and rest, and weren’t changed to force unsafe timeframes
Consignor, consignee	Manufacturers, retailers, distributors	Booking lead times, delivery windows, and that demands on carriers were reasonable
Packer	Warehouses, 3PLs	Declared weights and packing details for each consignment
Loading manager, loader, unloader	Distribution centres, ports, depots	Load restraint, mass declarations, loading times and queue waits

Each party has the same Primary Duty: to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the safety of its transport activities. Executives carry a separate duty to exercise due diligence that the business complies. For a software buyer, that translates into one question: when something goes wrong, can the business show what it knew, what it checked and what it did? Most logistics software requests we’d expect to see are really answers to that question.

What changed in the HVNL on 1 August 2026, and does your software need to change?

The amended Heavy Vehicle National Law commenced on 1 August 2026, after Queensland Parliament passed the 2025 amendment package on 18 November 2025. If your fleet, compliance or dispatch systems encode HVNL rules, they need a review against the new provisions.

Change area (per the NHVR)	What to check in your systems
Heavy Vehicle Accreditation (HVA) scheme replaces NHVAS, with safety management system audits	Accreditation records, module references, audit evidence and document templates
Work diaries: simplified written work diary record keeping, with transitional arrangements	Fatigue record validation logic, local area records, reports for record keepers
Fatigue and unfit to drive provisions	Fitness for duty declarations and how they’re stored
Mass, dimension and loading	Load planning rules, permits, mass declarations
Euro VI emissions and mass provisions	Vehicle master data and eligible mass limits

Two practical points. First, transitional arrangements mean old and new rules operate side by side for a fixed period, so rules need effective dates, not a single switch. Second, the HVNL hasn’t commenced in Western Australia or the Northern Territory, but it applies to vehicles from those jurisdictions once they cross into an HVNL state, and some requirements such as work diaries can apply before the border. A national operator’s systems need to know where each leg runs.

Fatigue record rules a system has to model

• A driver of a fatigue-regulated heavy vehicle must carry a work diary when working 100 km or more from base under standard hours, or at any distance under Basic Fatigue Management, Advanced Fatigue Management, alternative compliance or exemption hours.
• Drivers working within 100 km of base under standard hours complete a local area record instead and give it to their record keeper.
• Unplanned travel beyond 100 km changes which record is required, so the system needs the driver’s base location and the day’s route.
• Primary produce transport within 160 km of base may fall under a work diary exemption.

Should you build an electronic work diary or buy one?

Buy one, unless fatigue technology is your product. An EWD must meet the NHVR’s EWD standards and be approved, with conditions of approval and use. The NHVR and Transport Certification Australia have also introduced a Generation 2.0 EWD framework with a new system specification and stronger testing and governance, though existing approved systems remain approved.

Option	When it fits	Trade-off
Buy an approved EWD, use it as is	Most operators	Fastest; data may sit in the vendor’s portal
Buy an approved EWD and integrate its data	Operators who want fatigue data in dispatch, payroll and compliance dashboards	Integration work, but one view of each driver’s day
Build and seek NHVR approval	Technology companies selling to the industry	Long, costly approval path; justified only as a product

For most businesses the valuable custom piece is what happens with the data: warning dispatchers before they allocate a run a driver can’t legally complete, and reconciling fatigue records against telematics and job times.

How do a transport management system, WMS, telematics and ERP fit together?

In most logistics businesses the systems are individually fine and collectively disconnected, and the gaps are where both cost and CoR risk accumulate. Custom software usually sits between them.

System	Typical role	Common integration method	What the joining layer does
Warehouse management (WMS)	Inventory, picking, packing, dispatch	REST API, EDI, file exports	Pulls consignment weights and packing details into the load record
Transport management (TMS) or freight platform, such as CargoWise for forwarders	Bookings, rating, allocation, tracking	REST or XML API, EDI	Pushes allocations and receives status events
Telematics	Location, speed, engine data, sometimes driver ID	Vendor API, webhooks	Adds actual times and locations; flags speed or route anomalies
EWD	Work and rest records	Vendor API or exports	Checks allocation against available hours
ERP and accounting	Invoicing, costing	API or integration platform	Turns proof of delivery into an invoice without rekeying
Customer portal	Track and trace, documents	Your own API	Gives customers self-service visibility

Designing this layer well means event-driven messaging so one system’s outage doesn’t block the others, idempotent processing so a duplicated message doesn’t create a duplicated load, and a single load identifier that every system can map to. Our API development service covers that approach, and our workflow automation service covers lighter integrations where an off-the-shelf connector is enough.

What about driver tracking data and privacy?

Telematics, cameras and app location data are personal information about your drivers, so collecting more of it creates obligations as well as evidence. The same data that proves a safe journey can become a liability if it’s kept forever, shared loosely or used for purposes drivers weren’t told about.

Points to settle during design:

• Notice and consent. Some states have workplace surveillance laws with notice requirements for tracking employees; NSW’s Workplace Surveillance Act 2005 is one. Owner drivers and subcontractors raise separate questions. Get advice for each state you operate in.
• Privacy Act coverage. Businesses with annual turnover above $3 million, and some smaller ones, must handle personal information under the Australian Privacy Principles. Employee records held by an employer are partly exempt, but contractor and customer data generally aren’t.
• Retention. Keep fatigue and safety records for as long as the law and your risk profile require, then delete. A retention schedule per data type is simpler than arguing about it after an incident.
• Access. Dispatchers need current location; very few people need a driver’s full history. Role-based access and an audit log of who viewed what are cheap to build at the start.
• Location of storage. Store telematics and fatigue data in Australian cloud regions unless there’s a documented reason not to.

Handled well, drivers see the data protecting them as much as watching them, which helps adoption of the app far more than any feature. It also means that when an incident investigation asks for a journey’s records, the business can produce exactly what’s needed without exposing everything else it holds about that driver.

How is AI used in logistics, and where does optimisation help?

The most reliable uses of AI in logistics are document handling and exception triage; route optimisation is a mature field where proven solvers often beat new AI.

• Document extraction. Consignment notes, bills of lading, customs documents and proof of delivery photos can be read and matched to bookings with AI document processing, with a person checking low confidence fields.
• Exception triage. Summarising why a load is late from telematics, messages and job notes, so a dispatcher acts faster.
• Customer enquiries. Answering “where’s my freight” from live tracking data through an AI chatbot, with a handoff to a person.
• Forecasting. Demand and volume forecasts for rostering, built with standard data analytics methods first.

Use AI with care where it touches safety decisions such as allocation against fatigue limits. Those rules should be deterministic, tested code, not a model’s judgement.

What does a typical engagement look like?

A realistic first project is a load evidence and integration layer, built in phases over three to six months. Figures are typical Australian market ranges for an onshore senior team (AUD, ex GST), labelled as ranges, not quotes; the basis is in our custom software cost guide.

Phase	Weeks	Output	Typical range (AUD, ex GST)
Discovery	3 to 4	System map, data flows, CoR evidence gaps, integration access confirmed, fixed price	$12,000 to $25,000
Integration core	6 to 10	Event pipeline joining TMS, WMS and telematics around one load record	$40,000 to $100,000
Driver or yard app	6 to 10	Offline pre-start checks, load photos, proof of delivery	$40,000 to $90,000
Dashboards and alerts	3 to 5	Fatigue and allocation warnings, exception queues, audit exports	$15,000 to $40,000

A business needing only the integration core and dashboards would sit around $67,000 to $165,000 including discovery; adding the app takes it towards $200,000 or beyond. Replacing a legacy TMS is a different scale of project, and our build vs buy guide is the place to start that decision; see also our legacy modernisation cost guide.

Questions to settle before you commission anything

1. Which CoR functions does your business perform, and who owns CoR compliance?
2. Which systems hold the truth for bookings, weights, locations, fatigue and invoices?
3. Do your vendors offer APIs and test environments, and at what cost?
4. Where do drivers lose signal, and what must work offline?
5. Which HVNL transitional rules apply to your operation, and until when?

How All Webbed Labs approaches logistics projects

We start with paid discovery to map your systems and data flows, then quote a fixed price. Regulatory rules are stored as configuration with effective dates, so the next HVNL change is an update, not a rebuild. Source code lives in your repository from day one, data stays in Australian cloud regions by default, and every change passes automated type checks, visual tests and security scans plus a senior engineer’s review before it ships. The existing logistics and transport page covers our wider services for the sector.